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Despite the booming interest in the service, Q&A site invite-only model outside of the U.S. and a few select countries. This may be an attempt to control the growth of the community, similar to the early days of Facebook. This cautious approach is not only limited to its community. The service only opened up to search engines last August. Access via RSS feeds is limited. Recently it released a very limited API, coupled with the arrival of the first Chrome and Firefox extensions.

This morning, the new Foursquare Elections page went live. And when the polls open, Foursquare users who check in at polling places around the country will receive an official badge. If they choose, they can shout out to friends on Foursquare or their followers on Twitter using the #IVoted hashtag.

In the interview below, filmed at the NASA Tweetup at the Kennedy Space Center on the eve of Election Day, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley talks about how game mechanics, shaking the hand of a "robonaut" and what has drawn over 4 million people to try the service. "It's not just getting points and winning badges," he said. "It makes your days more interesting."

Facebook, the largest online social network in the world, will put a call to hit the polls at the top of millions of users' Facebook pages tomorrow and will attempt to help them find the nearest polling station.

Facebook told press today that the company will provide an official app on the site that locates the nearest polling place, badges that users can push out to their friends' newsfeeds to show that they have voted and live streaming video coverage of early results starting at 4 p.m. Pacific. As one of the fastest-growing communication channels in history, Facebook could shake things up tomorrow on election day.

Location-based social networking services like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR are increasingly popular, particularly among young people. Could game dynamics and technology be used to increase civic engagement and participation among them? Some intriguing tweets by the founder of Foursquare and an interview with the co-founder of Gowalla suggest that civic badges and other elements might be coming soon.

A great community for crowd sourced news and content, Digg is taking a page from the Twitter playbook and testing its mettle in the real-time stream. Similar to Twitter's Trending Topics, Digg is set to launch Digg Trends. According to a company blog post , the bookmarking community is offering users a chance to view trending stories before they make it to the home page. True to Digg fashion, this public view of the trend firehose comes with a catch. Voters have 10 minutes to digg or bury a story in order to determine whether it occupies valuable homepage real estate.

In a few weeks, moviegoers will flock to Philip Seymour Hoffman's latest rock ensemble flick Pirate Radio. A fictional period comedy about an illegal station in the North Sea, the film embodies the same anti-authoritarian sentiments that Gen X and Y audiences have grown to love. Jelli.net, a crowdsourced radio station with a Web-based interface, has found a way to democratize sound waves and captivate that same 18-35-year-old audience. The Bay Area company launched in June, allowing users to access a Digg-like interface and vote up or down real time on FM radio during CBS' Live 105 KITS' Sunday programming. As of this evening, the company has penned a national deal with 450 Triton Digital Media radio stations and a distribution deal with Australian broadcaster Austereo.

Yesterday, Google made a major change to the search results page that appears when you search for a person's name. Google Profiles, for people who have set them up, now appear on those pages. Today, Google opened a discussion about Google Profiles and called for voting on ideas about what they include.

Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, and it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.

With the upcoming U.S. elections only 12 days away, Google has released a new web site to help simply and centralize information about voting locations and voter registration. According to a blog post about the new U.S. Voter Info site, Google found it hard to believe that in 2008, this type of important information isn't better organized on the web. Because organizing info is what Google is all about, they took it on themselves to step in where government has not and have created an incredibly useful site for all U.S. citizens.